• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Do yourself a favor and soak them in some vinegar water after you get them home. About a 1:4 mixture of white vinegar to water. The acidity will kill the mold spores that cause the berries to go bad, and it won’t be strong enough to affect the taste after you rinse them.

    I usually just dump about a cup of vinegar into a mixing bowl and top it off with water when I’m getting groceries in. First thing I do is drop the berries in to soak. Then I put away all of my groceries, which gives the berries a few minutes to soak. Finally, I dump the bowl and give the berries a quick rinse with the sink sprayer.

    I haven’t had strawberries go moldy since I started doing it. If I forget about them in the fridge for a week or two, they’ll simply dry out instead.


  • It will only take two years if people actually fucking vote in the midterms. But midterm turnout is historically… Well… Complete dogshit. And republicans are statistically more likely to vote in midterms.

    That’s why Trump is moving so fast to try and secure things; He doesn’t truly have four years to cement himself as god-emperor. He only has two before he potentially loses his majority in congress. So he has to be crowned before then.

    But even with that being said, I don’t have high hopes. As I said before, republicans are more likely to vote in midterms. Maybe Trump’s antics will be enough to get some blue voters off of their asses. But at this point, I’m not holding my breath.










  • The barrier to entry is so low in fact that I worry about the day when terrorist groups begin to deploy them in major cities.

    We already have auto-tracking drones. They can lock onto a person and follow them around. The intended use is to allow live streamers and YouTubers to be able to stream/record video by simply sending the drone out. But if it can automatically track and follow a person, it can likely be reprogrammed to automatically home in on a person. And at that point, it’s just a matter of strapping some C4 to it. It would be the ultimate fire-and-forget weapon. Program it to ignore anyone with your military uniform (or find some other anti-tracking feature, like an IR reflector that the drone can see,) and you could surgically strike an entire neighborhood with a swarm of them.



  • Also worth noting that Japan’s constitution specifically prevents them from having a standing army. They’re only allowed a small “self-defense force” to protect their own borders in the event of an attack. It was one of the key concessions that Japan made in the wake of World War II. The world saw how Germany had invaded twice, and didn’t want that to happen with Japan in a few years. And one of the largest reasons Japan was willing to go along with it is because the US had promised to help them rebuild, and offered to protect them with their own military if they were ever invaded.

    Pulling out could have massively detrimental effects to Japan’s neighbors, especially considering the fact that far-right support has been on the rise in Japan too. Japan has always been a conservative country, but in recent years there has been a big slide towards nationalism and xenophobia. If the US military pulls out, then Japan will want to fill the void with their own military. And this would be happening right as the country is sliding towards neo-nationalism. Those two things combined are a dangerous combination.

    The US military bases aren’t super popular in Japan. Especially since there have historically been some high-profile cases of military dudebros causing trouble off base, and then running back to base to avoid being punished by Japanese authorities. Even when the military takes action against the person in question, Japan tends to see it as the military protecting their service members because Japanese judicial punishments tend to be much more severe than American punishments. So many Japanese people would likely take a “good riddance, we can do it better ourselves” stance.



  • Just out of curiosity, why bother running 4 instances of qBit for the various *arrs? Why not just use automatic torrent management, and have the different categories download to different folders? My *arrs are all using a single instance of qBit, and each service simply uses a different category with a different download path.

    The benefit is that I can see my total up/down speeds, ratios, etc very easily without needing to change to an entirely different instance. I can filter by category, or see everything at the same time.


  • Yeah, I just wish there was a way to automatically update the port whenever it changes. It doesn’t change often since my server tends to stay on 24/7. But when it does change, it would be nice to have it automatically update.

    Back before my current server, I was just messing around with it in Windows. I discovered that qBit actually stores the forwarded port in the registry, and PIA has a terminal command that can print the currently forwarded port. I tried to write a quick .bat script to automatically run when the PIA network adapter connected. The goal was to grab the port number and update the registry for qBit any time the internet went out or my server was rebooted.

    And it seemed to work fine. It launched when PIA connected, and pushed the new value to the registry. But that forwarded port was also apparently being stored somewhere else as well, because just updating the registry wasn’t enough; When qBit launched it still showed the old port number, even though all of the documentation I found said it was simply a registry value. At that point I just gave up and manually updated it every time I turned my computer on.




  • if we get larger we will definately need more niche things.

    I can’t even count how many times I watched niche subreddits get ruined by the tyranny of the masses. As a niche thing becomes more popular, you get more casual lurkers. And those casual lurkers don’t typically have a strong knowledge on the subject. So they’ll start to upvote things that sound plausible and are eloquently written to make the reader feel smart for understanding it. But that doesn’t mean the info is accurate or correct; It just means the info appealed to the masses.

    I work in a niche field of professional audio. The audiophile world has a lot of snake oil. Lots of people paying $2000 for solid gold cables when a wire coat hanger would sound exactly the same. I have seen “help, I have a buzz in my speaker and can’t figure out where it’s coming from” posts, where the top comment is suggesting a $7000 complete system rebuild… When all the OP needs is a 50¢ ferrite bead wrapped around one of their cables. But the “rebuild your system” comment was well written and sounded plausible to someone who only has surface-level knowledge, while the “ferrite bead” answer requires more in-depth knowledge on how interference is picked up in the first place. So the “rebuild your system” comment got pushed to the top.

    Basically, nobody likes feeling dumb. And if a niche community gets popular, the laypeople begin to outnumber the experts. If a question has an answer that requires more than surface-level layperson knowledge, it will often get buried in downvotes from the laypeople. Not because it was incorrect, but because it made casual readers feel dumb. Even if the experts know better, they’re simply outnumbered.